by Gaynor Paynter

G21 Africa Columnist

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/let23.htm") and enter it in the box after you click through.

Gaynor Paynter & her sons

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - Greetings to the world from all of us here in South Africa, where it seems like our long cold winter is finally nearing its' brutal and rather devastating end. This past weekend afforded us warm weather, which a lot of us took advantage of, to the point that we suffered our first sunburn of the season! We were reminded that this indeed is the country with the best weather in the world, although Capetonians, who are suffering a flood at the moment, may not agree with this. I beg all your prayers for this South African city.

My six year old came home from créche recently and asked me: "Mommy, do you know it's the 'lympics coming soon?" I said that I did and asked him what he knew about the Olympics. "It's running and jumping and stuff. We're learning about it at school."

With the Games being in full swing, I would like to make the point that there is nothing like a nation's victory in the sports arena to instantaneously and effectively unite a country (much more effectively than any politician could ever hope to do!)

In 1995, South Africa rejoiced as one man when our Rugby Team won the World Cup. Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar (the captain of the team) were, for me, the faces of the World Cup. They made South Africa important in world sport again. The crowd's rejoicing that day was something to behold -- we may have had to be taught the words to the national anthem, but boy! we sang it with gusto. That day it became the anthem of the entire nation. The new flag became the flag of the entire nation as it was waved in the streets of Johanensburg, Soweto, Cape Town, Mitchell's Plain and Khayelitsha. We had one thing we all wanted to celebrate, and that day violence and fighting was forgotten.

Again, our unbounded joy united us when we won the African Cup of Nations in 1998 and the world had to sit up and take notice. They were forced to see that in South Africa we have soccer players of note; when we play the game we play it with all our heart.

And that brings me to the Olympic Games.

We have had various previous successes at the Olympic Games -- remember that we were only readmitted to the Games in 1992 -- and who could forget the sight of two Africans, Kenyan Derarta Tulu who won the gold medal in the womens' 10000m, and Elana Meyer, the South African who took the silver, donning the flags of their countries and doing a lap of honour around the athletics field?

Then in 1996 there was Penny Heyns, who we all got up at 1am to see win gold in her breaststroke final (she took two gold medals that year). In 2000 there was Terence Parkin, the deaf South African swimmer who did us all so proud by winning Olympic silver.

This Saturday we defeated the mighty All Blacks (New Zealand team) at rugby -- against all odds. The score was 46 - 20, a good rugby score, and one of our players, Marius Joubert, scored a hat trick! To boot, the New Zealanders are not a team you can sneeze at! I heard comments that "On Saturday we're wearing our Springbok (SA Rugby team) jerseys, on Sunday we'll all be too embarrassed to!" This is a typical comment we hear from South Africans who don't believe in other South Africans! The tune was changed when our team delivered a crunching victory and Springbok jerseys were worn with pride on the Sunday!

Yesterday, we were again delirious with joy when four South African swimmers blew the rest of the pool (including Ame ricans, Australians and the Dutch) out of the water to take Olympic Gold in Athens for the 4 x 100m Mens Freestyle. This is not our first Gold at the Olympics, nor will it be our last. It is the first, however, for THIS Olympic Games, and a new generation of South Africans have experienced the unity this brings, among them, my six year old son. American sounding (they are at college in the United States) and yet oh so very South African, Roland Schoeman, Lyndon Ferns, Ryk Neethling and Darian Townsend stood high on the podium, so many miles away in far away Greece, and yet when the strains of Nkosi Sikelela iAfrika sounded and the gold medals glinted in the Athens sunlight, the distance melted away and we were there with our boys partaking in their victory, South Africans all, victors again on the world stage. This is the kind of victory that can do sports in general and the sport of swimming in particular the world of good, and it makes us all proud to be South African. Four South African heroes were born in 3:13,67 (a new world record) after ten years of preparation.

This victory is made all the more special for me personally by the fact that it was a team effort, not an individual effort. The Olympic Games afford individual glory, yes, team honour, definitely, and distinction for the nation, certainly. Our four boys were a team making this achievement possible for South Africa -- rather understated is the fact that Ryk Neethling sacrificed his chance of individual glory (he could have competed in the 200m Freestyle) for the good of the country. And this brings me to the crunch of today's letter.

Ryk Neethling's selfless act of sacrifice is so much more of an example to all South Africans, young and old, of any creed or colour, than anything done by any politician in the past. With thieving and corruption and theft rife in the government and in politics in South Africa, how interesting I find it to be that the example of selflessness that we all need should come from a sportsman.

How much can all South Africans, and indeed, all individuals, learn from this act of sacrifice? What can we all, in our own small way, sacrifice, to bestow honour and glory untold upon our country? I can guarantee you that if we were all to examine our own lives we would find a way in which we could better the country and bring to it deserved glory, be it by being a good ambassador for the country, by bringing capital into the country, by job creation, by being an upstanding citizen, by supporting those less fortunate in the community around us.

As much as we would like to think that there is, there is simply no one in the world who is better than anyone else. We are all flesh and blood, human beings, whether you are the Managing Director of a company, the cleaner of the company or the Prime Minister of the United States or the newborn baby born to the mother dying of AIDS. Therefore, we SHOULD sacrifice individual glory for the glory of us all. Food for thought.

I would like to close today's letter by saying that everyone in the world can participate in actions like this. Yes, I'm throwing out a challenge. Llook at your lives and decide what can be sacrificed to make your country glorious. A question I ask myself is: "What can I do, myself, as a South African, to make others PROUD to be South African? What can I do to make this growing country more great than it already is?" This is my country as much as it is Thabo Mbeki's or Nelson Mandela's.

Good friends, I must leave you now, but in ending I would like to say that no matter how many medals they bring home, our Olympians have done us proud. The total good that they have done our country may not be tangible yet -- in the immediate instance. We have all been given a lift by their success, but in the long term, the good may only be obvious when people inspired by their success themselves reach the age to participate in the Olympic Games. But the good done by our Olympic team is THERE, and for that we say thank you.